The Confiscation and Disposition of Loyalists' Estates in Suffolk County, Massachusetts

OHN Franklin Jameson's The American Revolution Considered as J a Social Movement turned the course of Revolutionary historiography. Following C. H. Van Tyne's approach, Jameson argued that the confiscation of loyalist lands altered and democratized existing American social and economic patterns.' His thesis, radical in I926, became orthodox within a generation, so that Robert R. Palmer, in i960, could present it without argument as evidence of the genuinely revolutionary character of the Revolution.2 Palmer departed from Jameson by arguing that the democratization had been limited and that a new propertied class emerged.3 Richard B. Morris, skeptical of the remarkable importance attached to confiscations, quickly challenged Palmer, arguing that the motives behind confiscation were financial and, excepting the windfall gains of a few insiders, the consequences of confiscation were essentially fiscal.4 Both scholars have based their revisions on detailed studies of the confiscation of loyalist estates in New York by Harry Yoshpe and Staughton Lynd.5 These studies have illumined fractions of the total picture, and all

Archaeology · Confiscation · Disposition · Political science · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American History and Culture · History · Law · Psychology · Social Psychology

• Redefining the Economic Elite in Salem, Massachusetts, 1759-1799

  Richard J Morris•The New England Quarterly•2000

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